a) I know what it's like to get nasty, vicious misogynous hate tweets from creepy males on the Internet -- most women bloggers do -- there's a sample of just one of thousands, by the creepy hacker Weev (@rabite). I don't have a problem with calling out and condemning this kind of behaviour, but I don't think it's merely a feminist problem; I see it as an anarcho-hacker culture antithetical to human rights and civil society in general for all of us, women, men and children.

b) Sarah Kendzior has a long history, in different settings, of causing provocations, stirring up raging controversies, and then when anyone debates her dubious theses and shifting premises, pretends they are guilty of incivility, harassment, sexism -- and as you can see, even imagining she needs to "call the police" (!) etc. Read my blog Different Stans to get an idea.

c) When I see her latest provocation based on rape threats, I keep this history in mind, although of course I condemn any such threat delivered against any women online. That's not the issue here -- but by once again creating a cocoon of sensitivity taboo and political correctness around a topic, counting on the fact that most gawkers at her provocation don't know her history, Sarah has obscured her active measure and promoted once again a peculiar, oppressive, non-documentary and arbitrary way of addressing the wrongs of the Internet.

Needless to say, I've never made any threat against Sarah Kendzior whatsoever -- it's preposterous. As the record shows, all I've done is...criticize her academic articles or blog posts. It's wild. I've never written her any emails and my tweets or blogs criticizing her don't contain anything remotely resembling a threat. Yet she herself complained about my legitimate criticism of her to my boss at a job to try to create an atmosphere of intimidation for me -- creepy!

Does that mean maybe her claims about these rape threats are fake as well? Oh, they may be very real, but it's her manipulation of this situation that should be examined here as it follows a historical pattern.

Trigger warning: no actual rape occurred, and the rape threats that occurred didn't occur from any of these parties but some other (invisible) parties, but people disagree what it all means. Basically, in the course of trying to knock the use of the term "bro" about certain figures that deserved a critique (or conversely, worship, I'm not sure, given that it's Piketty they're talking about as the "bronominist"), the link was made to Sarah Kendzior's tweet about rape threats from a "brocialist," and the Jacobin article seemed to fit that usage of "bro" as one of the cases of trivializing serious things.

Well, you might say no good deed goes unpunished, but it was an odd thing to do to accuse the target of the rape threats of doing something trivializing about her own rape threats to make a point only about "bro" linguistics -- not to get too meta about all this. But then, it's Jacobin. And that's just it. All of these people are sectarian weirdos.

Hence, Sarah's active measure around vilifying the left's various sorry manifestations. Whatever their sins, like good little PC children in the fierce re-education camp that is Twitter, they've deleted their Tweets and links and have written ardent apologies and thoughtful recantations. So that's all good, except, Sarah is now on a rampage and wants blood -- both she and her sidekick Joshua Foust falsely accused Jacobin editors and writers of issuing rape threats against her -- something that even all the sectarian leftists parsing this had to denounce as mendacious because they had done no such thing. But here's the thing:

Sarah Kendzior's purpose in life is to disrupt social movements, to pick out sectarian topics that she can use to pit people against each other, and to promote a "line" that can be shifting, but which generally tends to a) favour authoritarian Eastern governments and oppose Western governments b) favour ideological premises over rights and the rule of law c) favour networks of approved cadres over principles.

In her career on the Central Asian scene:

o She became famous for standing up to a widely-respected but pro-regime professor in the Central Asian studies field by chronicling the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan, but in the process, both minimalized violent Islamism and created a cover for many more reports later that in fact challenged dissenters or questioned the role of opposition movements (instead of challenging the regimes themselves) and favoured the status quo;

On another front, related to her obsession with unpaid internships, she:

o bullied, harassed and vilified a nonprofit organization working at the UN on violence against women, publishing falsehoods, displaying ignorance about how the NGO system works at the UN, and peddling a sectarian line supposedly about worker's rights, but really much more about naming and shaming her academic colleagues and peers.

Notice a pattern here?

Each one of these stories involve women's rights or human rights in some form or another, but yet in each instance, Sarah uncannily finds something politically incorrect about the women involved, and diguises her own assault on them as some sort of mission on behalf of higher principles of feminism -- even though concepts like women's rights aren't really what she supports -- what she supports is bureaucratic, authoritarian little cabals of only certain women and men bullying others and arrogating to themselves the power to decide what is "right". You know, Bolshevism.

When I saw her consistently backing up and excusing and running interference for the men at the Registan collective (she was the only woman), I called her the "office wife" because that's exactly how she behaved -- without any respect for women's rights and basic due process and decency and without any solidarity. That got me called "sexist" by her partner in crime (and protector in this current dispute, as in past disputes), the former DoD contractor Joshua Foust -- although the original problem with sexism started with her inability to stand up to bullying men -- and men writing awful stuff about women in the field and in general treating others terribly and taking utterly cynical positions on behalf of programs like drones.

It's odd -- and it doesn't make sense until you see it happen enough times over and over, and you realize that she is either a patholitical Internet persona engrossed in some sort of version of Internet hystrionics syndrome -- or working on behalf of some cadre movement or some other sinister power (she writes for Al Jazeera, a state news service of Qatar, which for me is not journalism but propaganda). When you see this pattern happen enough times, over enough years, with ever more publicized results and divided people, you realize there's something "up". Investigation is indeed required.

The three things she has done wrong on this particulate episode with the "rape threats," in my view, although your mileage may vary, is as follows:

1) She has treated the threats and the links to the threats or the casual attitudes toward the threats by Jacobin and Salon writers as somehow specific to these individuals and their superiors at their publications, but not to the leftist Marxist/socialist/radical ideologies they represent.

Imagine, being involved in any incident with something called "Jacobin magazine," and never pointing out that this is a radical movement celebrating Jacobinism, that is, overthrowing the state, and along the way, killing off class enemies with the guillotine. And whatever Salon's liberal genesis, is it now home for many Occupy-style radical ideologues like Natasha Leonard, and the real issue here isn't just their casual response to violence speech or acts against women, but their entire violent revolutionary ideologies that make the end justify the means, and the means coercive and destructive. (In a separate post, I will explain how the extreme, sectarian left ultimately diminishes rape by making it a mere subset of the problem of capitalism.)

This neglect of the deeper problems of the "movement" to single out only some aspect is what she does with the problem of women in tech -- it's about feminism, and not about hacker culture -- which she wants to preserve for its usefulness in breaking up bourgeois Western states, especially America.

2. She has implicitly denigrated the act of reporting on and publicly documenting one's rape threats or any kind of mistreatment as some kind of "privacy" act that is to be discouraged -- but which she herself is to be allowed "this one time" -- and then, of course, only partially. There's a lot of mystery surrounding the whole thing.

In her manipulative blog post, she lays out those parameters -- (the sectarian Firedog Lake was her Greek chorus in this regard) -- we must never demand that she publicize her e-mails or document her threats because to do so would be to indulge in "rape culture; worse, if anyone else decides to use the route of documentation and publicity, they must be attention whores -- because she's taking the high road by "never" talking about her personal life (the way the woman did who wrote that she was like "Adam Lanza's mother" -- who was first burnt at the Internet stake then sent to re-education school.)

Further, we are treated to the dubious thesis that "to talk about rape threats is to make them happen again or make more happen therefore we must never talk about them or link to them" -- a position that puts us not into feminist empowerment but submissive cultdom or frightened omerta.

This position is very much similar to her odd thesis in Central Asia studies journals that people who talked about the gross human rights violations and oppression of the regimes of Central Asia or the Caucasus were "scaring off" more ordinary Internet users and "ruining it for all of us" and thereby preventing a more moderate and incremental Internet space to be created. Fortuntately, activists in the region paid not the slightest attention to her.

3. She has favoured suppression of free speech over the old principle of displacing bad speech with good speech, thus joining the ranks of the PC and those who seek brow-beating and self-criticism circles on the open Internet, "trigger warnings" and removal of speech or forced apologies or shunning (in this she is just like her dear friend Jillian York who, counter-intuitively, is a program director at the Internet freedom organization Electronic Frontier Foundation.)

I had never heard of some of the newer feminists Kendzior has allied with or conversely attacked, although of course I know of Katha Pollitt and have gone to hear her speak in New York on a number of occasions and read her in the Nation.

Few women who read Mikka Kendall have actually laid in critical condition, bleeding on the operating table with a fetus with placenta abruption. I have. So I can look her dead in the eye and say I'm sorry for your terrible experience, I've had it, too, but here's the thing -- pregnancies at the stage of late-term abortion/premature birth are very hard to manage, but in our country with advanced medicine they usually don't end with the death of the mother, and all but a handful of Catholic hospitals (which make up 12% of all hospitals in the US) are not going to have second thoughts about abortions at this stage (if they really can establish it is 20-22 weeks). (I was offered an abortion, although also only after hours of painful waiting, but opted to have a very premature baby and have her treated in the NICU. She died a month later.) So I'd like to hear some more eyewitnesses to this story.

I usually don't favour Pollitt's own sectarian old-style socialist politics that have trouble finding fault with violent Islamist movements dominated by men and her embracing of the atrocious Anonymous provocation around the rape of the student in Steubenville.

I think what Sarah is doing now is a lot like the Anonymous disruption in Steubenville, which actually led to further vilification and shaming of the rape victim, the exposure of her name, the unjust persecution of innocent people, and obstruction of justice by making it difficult to gather testimony and get court witnesses.

Nothing that Anonymous was doing there was really about stopping rape culture -- a rape culture they themselves embraced before, during and after Steubenville in some of their outrageous statements on women, including against me, as a blogger covering their antics.

Rather, it was about disrupting the justice system as an institution of society and helping to break up society so that anarchy could prevail. There is some evidence that forces like Al Qaeda and foreign governments like Russia infiltrate and manipulate these hacker movements (the Snowden hack is only one very big and obvious example), and this is how they succeed -- while appearing to be an ordinary protest movement of the sort that has had legitimacy in American society.

What is the end result of what Sarah Kendzior is doing with this latest outrageous caper of hers? Is it really about pushing back against the outrageous behaviour of especially male techies and hackers online against women, and trying to create a safe space for women to excel? Not really, because that's not the result. The result is:

o splitting an already divided left even further -- although to be clear, the problems of the left's cohesion is not my problem and they will be doomed to division as long as they embrace radical and even violent ideologies over the rule of law;

o establishing only certain online figures as authorities on how to interpret the issue, and quashing dissent and the due process of publications and debates;

o discouraging the documentation and publication of human rights abuses, including online threats, under the guise of "privacy", and refusing to submit to due process and the rule of law to address the issue of violence against women; instead of building institutions, enabling networks to run roughshod over others who step out of line.

Trust me, the problem of violence against women, which is very big on the Internet even if it is cyberspace and injuries are psychic and not physical, does not get solved by creating a cabal of a few bullying, coercive females to rule the roost and discourage not only dissent, but calls on themselves to be accountable.

It's like the problem of misogynist men in tech is definitely not solved by having Anil Danish threaten, bully and get fired a coder who happened to make a tasteless rape joke on Twitter -- and then vow to run him out of the field all together. No women were raised up by Dash's Bolshevik tactics, and we don't want to live in a society where people like Dash, using those methods, prevail by force over others using positions of publicity and power.

The problem of hatred and misogyny is not solved by discouraging documentation and publication and thwarting the steady building up of movements of rights and solidarity. These methods sound old-fashioned in a world where we are supposed to achieve justice by getting links removed or tweets deleted or people blocked or banned. They only recur because those digital solutions do not change or curb human behaviour.

05/17/2014

(c) Beth Cortez-Neavel/Knight Center. Jill Abramson, at a conference organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. Pierre Omidyar's Network was among the sponsors.

I thought perhaps it really was some kind of feminism thing -- this is a real issue and I've experienced it myself in different workplaces even at the most "progressive" outfits. The number of perfect West Side liberals who deliberately pay women less in this town, and ask them intrusive and sexist questions like whether they plan on having any more children or not would make your hair curl. I do get that.

But I still felt as if there was something else "up" here in this story. After all, when we're in the half-million a year salary category, the numbers going up or down $50,000 aren't that big a deal -- it isn't fair to compare Phil Taubman with Abramson because Phil had served in foreign postings and had more seniority -- unless, of course, you call Washington, DC a foreign bureau. Abramson had never been abroad.

Like anyone close to journalism in New York, I had heard she was bitchy and also lefty. I worried after Bill Keller left because he held the line against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and wasn't uncritical of Snowden and was there when the Times did some critical reporting, with CIA sources, of Snowden's tenure in Geneva and later his seminar in India.

Then Keller left, and things changed for the worse. Charlie Savage, who went from a Manning critic to a Snowden booster, was allowed to run loose with the stories, all pro-Snowden, and some of which reprinted Foundation for Free Press press releases -- even though he is way too smart for that.

Not a single critical thing has been said about Snowden all this time, and glowing coverage is given to Greenwald's prizes (the prize really went to the Guardian, not him), his new book, etc. -- and worst of all the ombudsperson, Margaret Sullivan, who is supposed to be impartial, has absolutely gushed and fawned over the Snowdenistas.

There's a story in Glenn's book about how Sullivan privately apologized for an article that went out early in the Snowden affair in which two experts on China from the intelligence community were quoted as saying they thought it likely that Snowden's laptops had been copied by the secret police in Hong Kong. Greenwald bristled that there was "no proof" of this.

Well, what would he accept as proof? China is a police state and copies people's stuff all the time -- they hard-wire it into their computers for sale in the West. I'll never forget how the former political prisoner Wei Jingsheng once called out the West at the UN for selling the very equipment that enables China to do this surveillance better, too.

Not that they can't surveil on their own. I once watched in horror as Lenovo computers were gifted to all the winners of prizes one year at the Overseas Press Club. China hacks everything, including, BTW, the New York Times, whose people were threatened with expulsion. Of course anything Snowden had was copied, if nothing else, over that state-controlled wi-fi at his hotel and other means. It doesn't matter if there was "nothing" on his laptop but the means by which he reached his stashed documents -- they still might get something. Greenwald has no proof that they didn't.

Although Sullivan was appalling on this incident conceding in a column that it wasn't fair reporting, and appalling in another one conceding that the extremist loon Kevin Gosztola had a point, it wasn't enough for Greenwald, he still knocked the Times for not completely removing the offending lines about the theory of Chinese penetration. Imagine! Unless the field is completely sanitized of wrongful thinking, the Snowdenistas are never satisfied.

To be sure, the relationship between the Guardian and the Times has been cosy, although not completely without some mysteries (such as why the Guardian stole away Robert MacKey, another tendentious "progressive", but then he abruptly quit soon after making the move -- whereupon he came back to the Times again.)

The Guardian gave the Times all their Snowden stache when the British authorities came calling with a buzz-saw to destroy all the stolen documents. The Guardian also collaborated on WikiLeaks.

Abramson may have thought she could pull off this Guardian-splicing maneuver without anyone noticing it if she just kept it on the down-low and eased Gibson in as an "innovator" who was going to fix the Times lagging digital edition -- but it was caught, and that compiled with other problems meant she had to go.

Seldom at a place like the Times is the issue of "socialism" versus "capitalism" ever actually debated out loud, with terms like "technocommunism" ever being discussed -- that would be absurd. These things have to be articulated in "the personal is political terms".

But it's clear as a bell to me. Sulzberger, a capitalist, and his various editors, are liberals who want certain socialist things, and backed Obama for that reason. But they don't want socialism completely for themselves, and don't want to be overthrown, obviously. They like Snowden because he helps batter away at a Washington that they feel still hasn't "reformed" enough and doesn't welcome them sufficiently, and he is for "transparency" which they as newsmen like in theory (although not about themselves). They like the whole anarchy thing because it's a useful tool to get rid of enemies.

Yet they're not going to go to the mat for the revolution -- for example when Natasha Leonard, an Occupy operative who got away with pretending to be a Times stringer for awhile, was outed when she got arrested for refusing to disperse at the Brooklyn Bridge, she was out of the Times in a New York minute. That's how it is, and that's a good thing, because Leonard is a vicious radical socialist ideologue -- as you can see where she is perched now, salon.com.

Perhaps this near-death brush with socialist revolutionaries will be a sobering experience for the Times. Maybe the coverage of Snowden will come back and I will subscribe to the digital edition again.

My comment at Politico, "under moderation":

Oh, I get it now! This isn't at all about feminism, glass cliffs, salary discrepancy, or even a bitch female management style that wouldn't rankle if a man had it.

It's about whether or not the Times, which is liberal and capitalist, is going to hire away the stage manager of the Snowden operation, Janice Gibson, from the radical and socialist British Guardian's American edition.

And the answer is: no.

Abramson thought she could wrangle this by not keeping people informed, by making it be about women or digital or something else.

But it's about radicalization of the Times, and the owner saw it for what it was, saw that it was being put over on him and their colleagues, and said "no".

And I'm glad he did because I don't want the Times to be the Guardian. Indeed, I stopped subscribing to the Times precisely because of their poor and uncritical Snowden coverage which is way too enthusiastic about this felon and hacker.

Had they brought in Gibson, who authorized and engineered the Snowden operation in Hong Kong with Greenwald and edited the stories, under the guise of "modernity" we would get even more horridly skewed news. No thanks.

Watch to see Abramson get picked up by Pierre Omidyar for his "Intercept" or related projects -- although really, she's likely too expensive and too high-class for that operation that has filled up with bloggers like Greenwald. I can see her going to some other mainstream liberal paper or news magazine, perhaps. On the other hand, Marcy Wheeler has abruptly quit Intercept, they don't have any other women except Laura Poitras who is a mouse, so maybe Pierre will step up.

05/11/2014

Peter Ludlow (known in Second Life as Urizenus Sklar) has gotten himself into a terrible sex offense mess -- it's in real-life media.

It's not only in the campus news but online news and it has all the predictable cast of characters -- extremist feminists, outraged student's groups, hipsters screaming, etc. -- and even a Second Life angle. It's not only a campus case -- it is now in the court system in Illinois. Here's the court documents.

Ludlow is barred from teaching this quarter and seems to have quit (or been essentially fired) and while he was apparently in the process of obtaining a new position at Rutgers, students at Rutgers are up at arms. Although Ludlow has not been found guilty yet of any crime (from what I can tell), the mere existence of such a case is enough to get hysterical students rioting over his placement in their school.

These are people who -- like Ludlow themselves in their anti-Western contrarian politics -- who don't care about, oh, the massive abduction and rape of young girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria and aren't demonstrating against it like they would anything about Palestine, and who of course -- like Ludlow -- have nothing but contempt for law and order when it comes to Snowden stealing files and running to Russia -- or whether Weev or Browning or other creeps are let go and not prosecuted for their crimes.

But when it comes to a perceived sexual offense that does not even seem to be very serious on the face of it -- the plaintiff is not charging him with rape and indeed mass media with such headlines does appear to be defamatory -- they become absolutely hysterical. I try to understand what this is really about. No doubt Uri himself will have a paper on it someday... Surely it has something to do with the perversion of meaning or language...

Here's the thing: does Ludlow deserve his fate or is the manner of his prosecution not something any of us would want in a liberal society under the rule of law with basic due process rights?

Where does one start with Ludlow's loathsomeness? I was originally friendly with him and even shared an TSO lot with him for a time but then some friends and I pulled a prank on him to prove the outrageous fallibility of his "journalism" about online life. (We made a composite fake character called Selena, a teen-age witch, and had her tell Uri a tale of horror of online abuse by adult male warlocks -- and he bought the line and published it -- and then we revealed that she was faked and he was furious and banned me from his site for a time.)

Then there was his strange press campaign years ago to complain about his banning from TSO over his criticism of what he saw as underage prostitution -- but which was a story that he could never prove journalistically. And it was a contrived issue by contrast with another very real issue he would never criticize, which was the presence of hard-core BDSM communities and sites within TSO -- an online game which had kids as young as nine in it.

When I gave interviews to the New York Times and the Boston Globe with my criticism -- I opposed his banning on speech grounds but disagreed on the issues with EA.com, the game company, which were getting into the news -- Ludlow relentlessly searched for links between my real-life identity and my avatar's nickname until he could "out" me. He's very much of a "privacy for me and not for thee" sort of guy. He was my original experience with that sort of horrid doxing.

Then there was his delight in the dark Sim mafia -- the Shadow Sim Government -- that took over all the venues and bribed and extorted and terrorized -- in a simulated fashion of course, although you could really buy and sell the simoleons on ebay for real dollars. (The man who ran that had the last name Chase; I see his attorney has the same last name.)

Then there was his running of the tabloid Alphaville Herald, "a virtual paper for a virtual world" that was "always fairly unbalanced" which I worked at for a time despite our differences because I thought free press in oppressive online virtual environments controlled by companies was vital. We agreed on that, but of course, but only to a point. The minute I began criticizing the big corporate backers of the Alphaville's owners, who I said colluded in the copybot disaster undermining copyright in the virtual marketplace, I was reprimanded and then hounded -- so I quit. Uri presided over the most horrible harassment (known as griefing) of me inworld and out.

For years, he and the editrix in chief, Pixeleen Minstrel (who in real life was an Internet-famous guy named Mark McCahill who invented the Gopher program) vilified and harassed and ridiculed me to death in their paper because I criticized the same thing I criticize today: a) criminalized hackers b) arrogant ethics-free coders c) the open-source cult d) various online cults from BDSM to transhumanism e) the whole Chomsky/Derrida reductionist "there is no meaning" fractured fairy-tale which is philosophy today in universities -- which of course, is Uri's realm.

Precisely because of the Chomsky angle -- and his contrarian (actually -- establishment!) love of all things WikiLeaks, anarchism, Snowden, Manning, Barrett Browning, etc. -- Ludlow is very popular and seems to get tenure at every university he goes to -- and he has been to 10 or something in his career, he keeps changing them. He has published multiple books, including one on the Sims and Second Life that has a chapter on my character, Prokofy Neva, and has penned numerous op-ed pieces and articles favouring anarchist open-source cultism and copyleftism.

I don't know if scandals attend every change in his colleges, but there it is. It is common knowledge that he has had girlfriends much younger than he is (he is just my age, 57) -- I've met some of them even in real-life and in SL -- and he hasn't hidden that he makes hook-ups through Second Life of young women, but he hasn't ever been known to commit any "crime." This is legal, adult behaviour, you know -- the sort that feminists demand for themselves.

While he has an annoying online persona and belief system -- in real life, like a lot of such nerds, he's quiet, even shy, although he can be aggressive in smaller circles. Uri has a certain cult following, i.e. among the Woodbury University 4chan set.

The scandal he's currently involved in has a sordid Second Life angle -- wouldn't you know?! He was teaching a course on ethics in Second Life, and instead of discussing things like the way he and his friends would try to disrupt free association and free speech on servers in Second Life (mine) with speech they didn't like and felt shouldn't succeed, by dog-whistling and golf-clapping those who crashed servers and endlessly enabling their heckling and harassing of people, he tried to turn IBM's rather short-lived and not-too-deep involvement in Second Life as some sort of corporate evil. That's Uri - the Man, Capitalism, the One Percent -- you know, Occupy, hack, crash, whatever.

So somehow a woman in his class -- she appears to be under 21 -- gets together with him to go to an art show or something, and they wind up going from bar to bar and she claims Ludlow got her drunk, then groped her, then took her to his house and didn't drive her home.

He disputes a lot of it, but the facts of their time together, drinking, and ending up in bed (but not doing anything) don't seem disputed. Although his deputations, Uri seems to use that method so common to Second Life griefers -- pretend you are the victim and act outraged, when you are being called the perpetrator.

But...Here's the thing. If you are accused on a campus by a student, you have little recourse or rights. The hysteria, the feminists, the political correctness -- it's awful. They constitute a terrible witch hunt.

Not only is there any sense of proportion -- this is not a rape accusation with penetration we're talking about, or even groping of sexual organs against a woman's will, as in Steubenville -- this is a charge of attempted kissing, maybe a grope of a breast -- and not driving home. It's astounding that we never learn why this woman doesn't call a cab or friend and go home at any point in the evening if she had the discomfort level.

Naturally, if any of us had been on this particular scene in Second Life, we would have taken this woman aside and said, "Oh Gawd, don't hook up with Uri, he's awful, a lech, stay away." But she seemed to be pursuing -- to him tell it - and of course he could be lying -- the same way that he lies that crashing sims isn't a crime, or lies that Barrett Brown is being prosecuted for journalism, or any number of altered word-salad virtualities he passes off as reality in his Philosopher's Stone column at The New York Times (!) and elsewhere.

But...he gets to mount a defense against such accusations and he didn't get a fair trial. No one ever seems to in these campus cases. He quite rightfully pointed out that if he could bring records from the video camera in his elevator at home, receipts from restaurants and bars, and other kinds of adversarial evidence, i.e. eye-witness testimony, he might refute this girl's charges!

Yet he wasn't allowed to -- campus proceedings aren't real courts of law with laws for evidence and due process and discovery. The university simply rejects the attempts to bring other evidence.

Now that his case is in the Illinois justice system, maybe his lawyer will then get to bring forward such evidence as he can muster, and the case might eventually determine whether someone whose charges doesn't seem to amount to more than making some awkward sexual advances and not driving a woman home after a date might warrant the harsh punishment of expulsion or worse.

But meanwhile, he's already reportedly leaving Northeastern and heading to Rutgers, where he has been offered a position. And there, the Rutgers politically-correct students have their knives out and are phone-jamming and boycotting and saying that they can't have sex abusers on their campus.

Yet -- unless I missed something -- he hasn't been found guilty in a fair trial although the university seemed to automatically take the student's side and hasn't been able to mount a defense as a defendant should be able to do in a court of law.

Somehow, I think Uri and his lawyers will word-salad his way through yet another jam and pervert meaning along the way. But if you care about justice and civil rights, you have to hope that he is not punished for such mild infractions in a setting where he can't even mount a proper defense. This is a lose/lose case. If he wins, his reputation will be as low as it always was in some quarters; he will get high-fives from horrific misogynists nerdy creeps that make up his fan base; if he loses, no women's rights will actually have been served. In fact, even if he were prosecuted or fined or even jailed for cause, they would not be served. Because these cases are so often not about real rights, but about the political war-faring of enraged feminists undermining justice as a whole for all of us.

It is getting so that when you go out on a date, you have to get your date to sign a disclaimer. You have to get them to accept that you don't have a "duty of care" over them if you take them to a bar or drive them in your car. You have to get them to warrant that if they become intoxicated, it will be due to their own poor choices and not your fault. And so on. I can see contracts having to be signed even simply to have a cup of coffee. There's an insanity to all this that I just don't know where it will end.

I guess I feel that this sort of situation should be solved by real ethics -- the sort of ethics Uri and his awful hacker friends simply don't have. That would start with the basics -- that you don't socialize alone with students, taking them to bars, taking them to your home alone. These are all terrible practices. They should be unethical practices, for which teachers or professors should be censured and disciplined, but I don't think from one incident like this that doesn't have an actual rape or serious sexual abuse of any kind involved should a person be fired.

Students also should have ethics. Why do they go out with professors twice their age alone and drink with them? Are they trying to get good marks or do they have a daddy complex? No one in these situations ever wants to blame alcohol or drugs themselves, although clearly, no one has benefited from either parental or educational restrictions on over-indulgence in alcohol and usage of illegal drugs. If more people like Uri weren't blurring the lines on ethics in their teaching -- teaching that is entirely about subversion and perversion of customary meaning and morals -- we would all be better off.

I will never forget how Uri told Selena, when she texted him that she had to go and set the table, that she should deliberately put the fork and spoon out of their usual order to flummox her parents. So very Uri...

Human beings have a need for these laws -- and so what ethics can't fix because it's missing, and what morals can't fix because it is uncool to have them, the justice system has to fix -- badly! This is like trying to fix the problem of homelessness through emergency rooms in hospitals instead of through housing -- costly, stop-gap, ineffective.

For all the lawsuits and kangaroo courts and dismissals and ruinations of careers we've had in schools and universities in the last 40 years since the 1960s sexual revolution, has anything really gotten better? Doesn't it seem as if there are MORE rapes on campuses than less as a result? And it would be one thing if these were actual rapes prosecuted -- rape is a crime and has to be punished by state law, not merely campus regulations.

But how many of these cases involve just an awkard pass on a date gone wrong or somebody changing their mind? Too many...

The politically correct -- and their victims! -- would rather wield the power of troikas and draconian justice systems instead of simply conceding that the kind of morals you get from religion and civic and parental training in schools and home are necessary and should be valued. So reluctant are people like Uri to do anything but ridicule decency as some kind of cramp on their freedom that nothing but career ruination works. And now he is living that horror.

This is a situation like Weev's for some people (not me). They feel like he was so awful to Kathy Sierra (stalking her and threatening her and doxing her) and so awful to so many other people, and such an asshole in general (just review his Twitter timeline) with the most awful hate speech, antisemitism, and crazy violent shtick (the other night he sent me a link to a horror movie with a creature with a drill for a penis because...I had the temerity to say that I didn't think any force but governments should operate hacking tools) -- that he should get punished in a hacking case. But that's wrong, if you can't mount a successful harassment or stalking case (and maybe it hasn't been tried), to except a hacking case will do that job for you.

Those who want to exonerate hacking as a crime want him let off even though he's an asshole. I hope he will be prosecuted in a new venue for the crime of obtaining unauthorized access to AT&T's customer data through hacking -- yes hacking, because that's what hacking is, unintended use and stealing of customer data not intended for hackers to take and cause havoc with. His fans think it's a free speech issue.

In Uri's case, I couldn't ask for an unfair trial on hysterical feminist witch-hunting to be the way in which he meets his justice. Because then any one of us could be subject to such a politicized system.

As I said in Steubenville, when Uri was happy to sanction Anonymous wild and unethical behaviour, I'm on the side of the rape victim and don't try to diminish her suffering or plight. I'm a big believer in Andrea Dworkin's saying that the punishment for getting drunk on a date with a frat boy in your dorm should be a hangover, not rape. Certainly if these student's charges stick, some kind of discipline might be warranted short of dismissal simply because there are simply too many elements of this story that require that the student herself, even if she were under 21, should have exercised basic good judgement and remedy her own situation.

Remember, in this case, rape isn't even part of the charges, and even sexual groping or "getting a minor drunk" or whatever other offenses might pertain are not established by courts of law -- and it sounds like they won't be.

Like that dying Islamist who flew to America for medical treatment before going to Paradise about whom V.S. Naipaul wrote, Uri is now looking to law and meaning and courts and righteousness and justice to save him -- all the things he thinks are shit and the Man and should be destroyed by Anonymous and Occupy. All the things he ridiculed and undermined his whole life. I hope the irony is not lost on him and he experiences some kind of remorse -- although it sounds like there is none available in his particularly invincible virtuality.

There's an odd feature of this story -- the Rutgers Department that Uri may be hired into is the one where my cousin used to teach -- but he died recently. He fell ill some years ago and there was a vacancy -- maybe the very one that Uri is now filling.

04/22/2014

As you know I've provided two long blog posts here and here with a thorough thrashing of the Vanity Fair piece on Snowden, knocking it as a cut-and-paste job with a few self-serving quotes phoned in from Snowden. I'm totally unimpressed.

What I hope for in a report like this -- even though I know in advance I won't agree with their take on Snowden -- is actual new news or new insights. I don't feel they were there.

So in this show, we get Suzanna Andrews contributing editor of Vanity Fair, extolling the wonders of not only Snowden, but Laura Poitras, who she thinks is the unsung heroine of the hour -- after all, Glenn Greenwald blew off Snowden because he was too geeky asking for encryption, and Bart Gellman - and Suzanna is frank on this as I am -- wimped out of going to Hong Kong.

So what else does she think? She is struck that Snowden "has no plan B" -- "maybe kinda go to Iceland, maybe kinda go to Cuba". Because she says this with an air of New York shrewdness, it seems convincing.

But it's nuts, and comes from not asking the most basic questions about this case, as those of us critical have been saying from word one, jumping up and down and asking why nobody is asking about the Cuban visa, or the Russian visa -- even if a transit visa - or Sarah Harrison's visa to stay there -- after all, she didn't ask for asylum. We're not being told the truth about it, and we don't buy the story of the expired passport "passing" or the flimsy Ecuadorean travel document being accepted.

The only way it was possible was that it was pre-wired by the Russians. It took meetings with Russian diplomats in advance; it took planning; it took conspiracy with Russia. The Chinese were happy to wash their hands of Snowden; the Cubans were under pressure (although Castro denies that they would have caved to US threats if Snowden actually arrived), but the Russians *wanted* Snowden. Putin offered him to apply for asylum on June 11. That is so often overlooked. You can't take a situation where the head of Russia offers you asylum on June 11, where the US doesn't file its extradition request until June 21, and say that for 10 days, you had no choice, you "just had to" be forced to go to Russia, and had no options.

Suzannah also decides -- again, in her infinitely shrewd magazine editor's wisdom -- that he is not a traitor -- and has a good chortle with the TV host about Rep. King who has called Snowden a traitor -- aren't these conservatives backward?! Blah blah.

I look out the window and think to myself: this TV studio is only 30 or 40 blocks away. I live in the same city with this woman. Yet we have such diametrically opposed views -- and she claims to be more worldly-wise because of her position in one of the most glossy magazines on the planet.

What sustains me when I see how stricken the media empire is with Snowden-mania is that ultimately, the veils will fall away and we will get the story. Maybe it will be in 50 years. But it will come out -- and I suspect it will come out from either Snowden himself -- he's an awfully vain creature -- or one of his comrades like Jacob Appelbaum who just wants to chatter and get the limelight -- and maybe some sort of plea-bargain.

It's been a puzzle to figure out why they are so driven to attack me, given that we are supposedly on the same side of many issues, particularly Russia and Snowden, but there it is, they have turned on me like vicious junkyard dogs.

Some people think Craig Pirrong *is* LibertyLynx, but he vigourously denies it, even as he says that he knows who it is. The two do indeed seem very close -- in views, and in friendship, i.e. they seem to have met each other in real life.

Ordinarily, I don't have any "need to know" who LL's real identity is, but when it reaches this level of sinister crazy, with a person constantly writing nasty and false things about me, and even threatening me with lawsuits (!) I think it's important to keep publishing my findings.

I would like to think that in harassing me in this wild fashion, both Craig and Liberty are consumed with some kind of falsely-planted information, that they have a case of mistaken identity. They both have outrageously charged me with being the stalker Mr. X (senorequis776) who in fact harasses both of them -- and me. They keep reiterating this theme that they think I deliberately "grief myself" as some kind of plausible decoy. But that's insane -- I don't have time for such nonsense and have never done such a thing in my life. I'd like to hope that if only the facts were found, they'd back off. Now I have to wonder if they are simply contriving this merely out of spite or ideological difference.

Both of them seem particularly pre-occupied with my known avatar Prokofy Neva, linked to my real-life name for the last 10 years, which they think is some dark, mysterious and sinister figure. That's insane, because my blog under the name Prokofy is an open book, as is everything else I do. The people I criticized in Second Life were hackers and griefers and people with ideologies antithetical to liberal governance and human rights -- I stand by my critique.

So in an effort to get this harassment to stop, I've written to Pirrong and asked not only him, but LibertyLynx to stop their false accusations and to remove them from their website. This has only made them double down, and go further to claim that my very emails or communications are somehow "forensic proof" that I am their stalker Mr. X.

So I've tried out various hypotheses about who this could be, and tried to understand the motive. And I think I have a good hypothesis now about the real identity of @LibertyLynx:

I came to this conclusion finally yesterday, when various factors came together and I noticed, looking at various feeds and common re-tweets that there were three simultaneous attacks under way on Twitter yesterday all day--

1) against me and Edward Lucas, by Cryptome, Jacob Appelbaum and the other Flying Monkies (such an apt term -- h/t Tom Nicholas) from the hacker set;

2) attacks just on me from @streetwiseprof (Craig Pirrong's account) and @LibertyLynx; and

3) attacks on th3j35t3r (the Jester), a popular Twitter hacker character, who tweeted that Rachel Marsden, with whom he had clashed in the summer of last year, was trying to "climb up the flagpole of his followers" close to him to out his real identity.

My own communications with th3j35t3r have been sparse, but I've asked him some hard direct questions, like why he appeared, like a law enforcement agent, to have pictures of the Boston Bombing within minutes of the first eye witness' report, and why, on the day before the Boston Bombing, he said he suspected Al Qaeda might infiltrate Anonymous push it to direct action attacks offline like terrorist bombs.

th3j35t3r has been declared to be Tom Ryan -- I simply have no informed opinion on this subject. I think it's unlikely, as Tom Ryan (whom I don't know, either) looks to be smarter than the th3j35t3r. Hey, note that this article written in May 2012 has Ed Snowden as an author -- yuck yuck. But it's tied to a banned Twitter account that impersonated him AFTER the real Snowden revealed his identity on June 9, 2013, and was ultimately banned; I don't think the real Snowden wrote for chronicle.su (sigh) back in 2012, but I think some prankster put that name in later.

th3j35t3r spends endless hours poking at and skirmishing with various script kiddies and the stay-at-home moms on the IRC channel playing Wendy to the Lost Boys and endlessly planning attacks on his enemies or cackling at their failures. I don't find this the most effective way to fight hackers. th3j35t3r is supposed to be fighting hackers, but I suspect he is/was one of them and uses their same methods -- except not quite, and its the fact that @AsheraResearch and others called him out on that reality that has made him angry.

I have no idea why Rachel Marsden took up writing a column about the th3j35t3r, but there it is. At the time, it seemed to say more about him than her -- but if it is made up of falsehoods, it wouldn't, it would say more about her. I have no knowledge to confirm or deny any of this. Thoughts?

Rachel Marsden's columns, taken alone without the fable of her colourful life, seemed normal and within the realm of the conservative/libertarian right to me. She is productive and writes about all the topics that definitely need writing about -- Syria, attacks on capitalism, Russia and the Olympics. I never saw anything terribly "off" on them, i.e. loony, but some of them were "not for us" as they more conservative. Being a Fox news commentator as she was wouldn't be a disqualifier for me, although I don't watch Fox News (and only two million people do).

They might have some basis, but might not, as one of the most common things that hackers do when they stalk and harass women is try to turn the tables with an Eddie Haskell routine and claim that they are the ones being stalked, and then cry "victim." I've seen this numerous times. On the other hand, there's at least one case in her public record of her stalking an ex-boyfriend that has court papers that go with it, although it appears not to involve a conviction but some kind of warning for a period of probation or something. Then there are several others -- and it's a case of he-said, she-said.

As noted, Rachel Marsden's life has been very colourful -- she had an affair with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, who is a certifiable ass -- his Randian Objectivism and manipulation of people and the horror that is the creation of Wikipedia all speak for themselves. Her affair went sour -- no surprise there. Apparently she was trying to get her Wikipedia entry fixed or de-vandalized -- hey, I know what's that like, as mine is constantly vandalized.

In re-reading Wales' entry on Wikipedia, I was struck by something interesting -- he was in Chicago, and working in a company doing finance, when he wanted to contribute an entry to the precursor of Wikipedia, Nupedia, and was embarassed to do so, because he feared that his peer reviewers, real finance professors, would show him up. Doesn't that say it all? At the very heart of Wikipedia is an insecure Objectivist asshole's desire not to face the music with his inadequacies and accept someone might be more of an expert than he, so he decided the entire system had to be constructed on anonymous fucktards writing tripe about people and events about which they aren't experts -- and no one can fix it, because of the pseudo-science of the arcane editing process itself, in which you must "be an expert."

But that brings me to the touchpoints on Rachel Marsden and LibertyLynx: Chicago and finance. Rachel doesn't live in Chicago, but she writes for the Chicago Tribune regularly, so maybe she travels there. And somehow, she may have come into contact with Craig Pirrong in person, when he taught there -- or maybe they merely met on line. Perhaps they simply go to the same conservative talk shows or conferences or meet-ups.

She's a widely-travelled journalist, and has been everywhere, evidently even to Moscow. So let's go through the list of clues that have been compiled (and many of them in fact not by me, but others just as disturbed as me at the whole LibertyLynx persona and its viciousness):

o has lived and worked in Russia and has Russian relatives

I have no idea if Marsden has any relatives in Russia -- I don't see any reference to it -- but she seems to have gone to Russia to interview or write about people. Except, she could have done this from Paris.

@LibertyLynx has made repeated references to relatives (in-laws? Distant cousins?) in Russia but does not appear to be Russian herself, and almost never makes links to Russian web sites as if she doesn't read Russian.

It does not seem readily apparent that Marsden went to Russia, although she has written about it a lot.

Marsden worked for the Free Congress Foundation in 2002, headed by Paul Weyrich. She was said to be fired when her harassment law suit in Canada came to light (we have no idea if this is true given propensity of the left to oppo-research the right). The FCF was involved in a conference in 2002 in Moscow. Weyrich himself did not attend a forum in Moscow, but he sent a "stand-in". Was that Marsden, and is that when she took the photo of herself on Red Square in the Russian hat? Or did she go some other time? Who knows? Some people think that photo is "photoshopped" from an Angelina Jolie movie. Maybe it's actually Marsden with a scarf over her mouth and a hat pulled down so you can't readiliy recognize her? The nose looks the same (if looked at from a certain angle if her head is tilted down -- otherwise, not the same. The eyes are also similar -- but it depends on the angle. Any of the photos may have been photoshopped as well.)

o has been to a Russian closed city

@LibertyLynx's tweets about visits to a closed city were deleted but have been archived. It's not easy for foreigners to get into closed cities, i.e. places where traditionally classified/secret work has gone on, or near sensitive military installations or borders, and if she did this, that alone could get her in trouble with the authorities and earn her warnings from the FSB. @LibertyLynx has repeatedly invoked threats from the FSB as a reason for her pseudonymity -- but we don't know that this is even true for that typist, or even for Rachel Marsden.

LL frequently makes comments against various figures, notably Elon Musk, the electric car inventor, and has also said she has lived in, or visited San Francisco, and happened to go to a funders' dinner where there were some big Silicon Valley people she met

This could be consistent with Marsden's soured romance with Jimmy Wales. That might be Marsden meeting Wales or others related to him.

o concerned about hackers attacking infrastructure

The last fight that I had with @LibertyLynx and @Streetwiseprof last was about his claims that hackers are attacking the stock market and infrastructure, and my skepticism not about the fact that hackers do this -- of course they do -- but skepticism that Jacob Appelbaum/Snowden etc are the ones specifically doing this; and then @LibertyLynx's fury at me for disagreeing somewhat on this point.

Neither LibertyLynx nor Rachel Marsden appear to have written about Boston terriers.

There seems to be enough there of a "match" to make a hypothesis that Rachel Marsden is indeed LibertyLynx (and there are other very similar "Liberty" accounts like @LibertyTango and @LibertyImages and they even talk to each other that sound the same).

There are a few key details that LibertyLynx herself has told me about her ostensible life experience that can't be matched, but not everything is on the Internet, she may not be telling the truth, and there may be an effort to drop false clues. For example, the bit about the tennis -- when maybe the issue is that Marsden was a swimmer, not a tennis player.

When the left attacks people it doesn't like, it's happy to drum up all kinds of vicious falsehoods or exaggerations about them. This type of article about Marsden is typical, from the Daily Kos. So I'd be inclined to cut this person slack, simply because I know what leftists and hackers do to females they don't like on the Internet, I've been through it.

Even so, the viciousness of LibertyLynx to me for no reason merely because I disagree on a few points and don't care for her harassment of ideological opponents; the curious recurring obsessiveness that Marsden appears to have for her targets; the pictures' striking similarity; the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics coincidence; and a few other things stand out for me. I think we have a match.

Yet, I pose this only as a question and a hypothesis simply because I've seen it happen before where things seem to match -- and then fall apart. You can select out characteristic information from anyone, and then match it selectively to other information and it seems to "fit."

I also can't rule out that the enemies of Marsden who see her as a stalker might then decide she "must be" @LibertyLynx who has been harassing me, and thus pin LL's bad behaviour on this Canadian columnist for the Chicago Tribune. And no doubt, in order to preserve her pseudonym, if LL *is* Marsden, Marsden would simply ignore this post or any speculation about her relationship to Pirrong or would deny it.

Ultimately, if any of these characters claim to have some "kompromat" on me, they should publish it rather than merely invoking it as a threat or threatening lawsuits. Then we could judge what it is. They could also contact a reputable journalist about it, if they really believe in their material, and subject it to scrutiny. They don't seem to be willing to do that.

An article "Conspiracy theory" by Alexander Yusupovskiy on 25 April 2003, published in Russian online media Russian Journal, edited by Russian politologist Gleb Pavlovsky, criticized Polyanskaya's theory of web brigades as an attempt at creating myths by people claiming to be Russian liberal thinkers in a response to the massive "sobering up" of the Russian people. A point was made that the observed behaviour of forum participants may be explained without a theory of FSB-affiliated brigades.[2]

It was mentioned in the 2007 sociological research of large groups in Russian society by the RIO-Center, the belief in the existence of web-brigades is widespread in RuNet. Authors say "it's difficult to say whether hypothesis of existence of web-brigades corresponds to reality", but acknowledge that users professing views and methods ascribed to members of web-brigades may be found at all opposition forums of RuNet.[3]

The expression "red web-brigades" (Красные веб-бригады) used by Anna Polyanskaya as a title to her article is a pun with "Red Brigades".

In February 2009 Russian opposition activist Tatyana Korchevnaya revealed her personal account as an insider in an Internet group, which used methods resembling those of ascribed to web-brigades, but whose goals were entirely different: instead of supporting Putin's regime, members of that group combated defenders of the regime.[4]

Contents

Polyanskaya's article

This alleged phenomenon in RuNet was described in 2003 by a French journalist Anna Polyanskaya (a former assistant to assassinated Russian politician Galina Starovoitova[5]), French journalist Andrey Krivov and United States programmer and political activist[citation needed] Ivan Lomako. They claimed there exist organized and professional "brigades", composed of ideologically and methodologically identical personalities, who were working in popular liberal and pro-democracy Internet forums and Internet newspapers of RuNet.

The activity of Internet teams appeared in 1999 and were organized by the Russian state security service, according to Polyanskaya.[1][6] According to authors, about 70% of audience of Russian Internet were people of generally liberal views prior to 1998–1999, however sudden surge (about 60–80%) of "antidemocratic" posts suddenly occurred at many Russian forums in 2000.

He thought that officers of GRU or FSB have more topical problems than "comparing virtual penises" with liberals and emigrants.

Commenting on the change of attitude of virtual masses in 1998–1999 authors evade any mention of the 1998 Russian financial collapse which "crowned liberal decade", preferring to blame "mysterious bad guys or Big Brother" for that change.

Authors exclude from their interpretation of events all different hypotheses, such as internet activity of a group of some "skinheads", nazbols or simply unliberal students; or hackers able to get IP addresses of their opponents.

Authors treat independence of public opinion in spirit of irreconcilable antagonism with positive image of Russia.[2]

Team "G"

An article based upon the original Polyanskaya, Krivov, Lomko's article on web brigades and authored by the Independent Customers' Association was published in May 2008 at Expertiza.Ru website, the term web brigades replaced with the term Team "G".[7]

To tell the truth, I experienced the sense of paranoidal disturbance after getting informed of the results of Name of Russia vote and the report of the Independent Customers' Association. That feeling is familiar to everybody who upon having thumbed through the "Popular Medical Handbook" immediately unveils that one has the majority of uncurable diseases, symptomes of which precisely match your physical condition. So, judging by the "mainstream propaganda" points and the list of "major enemies", your old columnist must unambiguously be in service of FSB and join the well-matched ranks of the Team "G". But he doesn't – what's the trouble! And likewise, there are no members of the Team "G" among the vast majority of my friends – writers, artists, producers, journalists, medics (the very intelligentsia that we, as defined by the ICA, have to hate mortally – that is, to hate ourselves...), while they fully share my worldview.

The more, the worse is it. The "mainsteam propaganda" is abundant of the great amount of saddening discrepancies with my believes: so, feeling sincere nostalgia for the USSR and deep distaste (hatred is too strong a feeling for me) to human rights defenders, Yeltsin and the abovementioned list of "major enemies" at the level of names and last names, I'm absolutely indifferent to "independent journalists" (because I'm the one myself), as well as to all tribal definitions of the list – Chechens, Jews, Americans. What the complete nonsense?! Why on earth would I hate all Europeans?! Or to the contrary – love employers or line-crossers of KGB?! Or – love Putin with the modern Rossiyansky authorities?[8]

”

“

Does the Team "G" prowl expanses of the RuNet? Quite probably. Moreover it's likely to prowl, why wouldn't it? But in exactly the same manner there's the Team "E" from the opposite camp, represented by the anonymous Independent Customers' Association that prowls, honestly fulfilling its agenda and entering released funds. But how are these "teams" related to real life?! Absolutely no way. Both of them are here at work while we, the ordinary inhabitants of the RuNet, live here. [8]

”

Nashi involvement

In January 2012 a group that presented itself as the Russian wing of the Anonymous published a massive collection of what they claimed to be e-mails of former and present leaders of the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi (including a number of government officials). Journalists who investigated the leaked information discovered numerous references to an army of paid commenters that reportedly operated in the fall of 2011.[9] According to the e-mails, members of the "brigades" were paid 85 rubles (about 3 US dollars) or more per comment, depending on whether the comment received replies; some were presented with iPads. A number of high-profile bloggers were also mentioned as being paid for promoting Nashi's and government activities. The Federal Youth Agency whose head (and the former leader of Nashi) Vasily Yakemenko was the highest-ranking individual targeted by the leaks refused to comment on authenticity of the e-mails.[10]

The project was allegedly coordinated by a Moscow-based manager, whose name Tatyana did not reveal.[16] The goal of the participants was massive Internet campaigning, disputing those who were contented with their living in Russia, advertising Garry Kasparov and Dissenters Marches, and talking about atrocities of the "bloody regime".[16] The participants used multiple nicknames to combat their opponents.[16]

Korchevnaya considered such scheme abnormal: "I believe that if someone is afraid to say what they think out loud from their own names then they are not a free person – it's as if they're playing for both teams."[16] She explained her confession with getting tired of the lie of those who she sincerelly trusted before.[16] The other reason was a concern for herself:

“

With every passing day I become ever more saddened by the things they told me. I began to experience hitherto unfamiliar feelings, which I only later figured out as like being a "sacrificial lamb on the altar of democracy".[4]

”

According to an anonymous source Tatyana referenced to, after she left the project it was "launched on a larger scale than was planned at the start", with participants "planning to ditch their real life jobs and embark on this project full time, especially now that they are going to get paid for it".[4]

For various reasons, I worry that this apparently original version of an excellent essay on Web Brigades might be erased or deleted by over-zealous sectarian Wikipedia mods, and so I'm re-printing it here.

I'm not sure it's the original version, but it's a version of the article "at a certain date" as the author says.

That is, this version of the article is preserved here on that user page (you'll see what I mean in the next post).

I don't know Elysander but I stumbled on them because a Twitter account commenting on something I said about Snowden had this URL in their profile. I get bombarded by so many hecklers that even well-meaning people can get lost in the shuffle so now I can't find them again.

I'm including the German here, even though I don't know what it says -- Elysander may be German (or Russian-German -- they have Russian text also on the user page). Someone can tell me.

It's a really great list of not only how the pro-Putin/Nashi/United Russia/FSB supported Internet hecklers behave -- their repertoire, after all, came from the Leninists in the KGB -- but of how in general, WikiLeaks, hackers, anarchists, Anonymous behave (Occupy, too, although they are a special sectarian case with their own weirdness like the "general assembly" and the hand waving stuff).

Now stay tuned to the next post, which shows you this topic in its present form...

They described organized and professional "brigades", composed of ideologically and methodologically identical personalities, who were working in practically every popular liberal and pro-democracy Internet forums and Internet newspapers of RuNet.

The activity of Internet teams appeared in 1999 and were organized by the Russian state security service, according to Polyanskaya. [3][2] According to authors, about 70% of audience of Russian Internet were people of generally liberal views prior to 1998–1999, however sudden surge (about 60-80%) of "antidemocratic" posts suddenly occurred at many Russian forums in 2000.

Views

According to Polyanskaya and her colleagues, the behavior of people from the web brigades has distinct features, some of which are the following:[2]

Any change in Moscow's agenda leads to immediate changes in the brigade's opinions.

Nostalgia for the Soviet Union and propaganda of the Communist ideology, and constant attempts to present in a positive light the entire history of Russia and the Soviet Union, minimizing the number of people who died in repressions.[2]

Emigrants are accused of being traitors of the motherland. Some members will claim that they live in some Western country and tell stories about how much better life is in Putin's Russia.

Before the Iraq War, the brigade's anti-U.S. operations reached unseen scale. The original publication describes: "it sometimes seemed that the U.S. was not liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein, but at a minimum had actually launched an attack on Russia and was marching on the Kremlin." However, it fell silent suddenly after Putin announced that Russia was not opposed to the victory of the coalition forces in Iraq.[2]

Tactics

Round-the-clock presence on forums. At least one of the uniform members of the team can be found online at all times, always ready to repulse any “attack” by a liberal.[2]

Intentional diversion of pointed discussions. For instance, the brigade may claim that Pol Pot never had any connection with Communism or that not a single person was killed in Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by Soviet tanks.

Individual work on opponents. "As soon as an opposition-minded liberal arrives on a forum, expressing a position that makes them a clear "ideological enemy”, he is immediately cornered and subjected to “active measures” by the unified web-brigade. Without provocation, the opponent is piled on with abuse or vicious “arguments” of the sort that the average person cannot adequately react to. As a result, the liberal either answers sharply, causing a scandal and getting himself labeled a “boor” by the rest of the brigade, or else he starts to make arguments against the obvious absurdities, to which his opponents pay no attention, but simply ridicule him and put forth other similar arguments."[2]

Making personally offensive comments. Tendency to accuse their opponents of being insane during arguments.

Remarkable ability to reveal personal information about their opponents and their quotes from old postings, sometimes more than a year old.

Teamwork. "They unwaveringly support each other in discussions, ask each other leading questions, put fine points on each other’s answers, and even pretend not to know each other. If an opponent starts to be hounded, this hounding invariably becomes a team effort, involving all of the three to twenty nicknames that invariably are present on any political forum 24 hours a day."[2]

Appealing to the Administration. The members of teams often "write mass collective complaints about their opponents to the editors, site administrators, or the electronic “complaints book”, demanding that one or another posting or whole discussion thread they don’t like be removed, or calling for the banning of individuals they find problematic."[2]

Destruction of inconvenient forums. For example, on the site of the Moscow News, all critics of Putin and the FSB "were suddenly and without any explanation banned from all discussions, despite their having broken none of the site’s rules of conduct. All the postings of this group of readers, going back a year and a half, were erased by the site administrator."[2]

Criticism

There is difference between "dislike of hegemonic policy of the United States" at Russian forums and "quite friendly attitude towards usual Americans". Aggression and xenophobia doesn't characterize one side but is a common place of polemics, well met not only among Russian patriots, but among Russian emigrants from US, Israel, or other countries as well.

Change of attitude of virtual masses in 1998-1999 could be caused by Russian financial collapse which "crowned liberal decade", rather than "mysterious bad guys".

Authors exclude from their interpretation of events all other hypotheses, such as internet activity of a group of some "skinheads", nazbols; or hackers able to get IP addresses of their opponents.

Officeers of GRU or FSB have more topical problems, than "comparing virtual penises" with liberals and emigrants.[9]Yusupovskiy concluded that

"We would never make our country's military organizations and security services work under the rule of law and legal control, if won't learn to recognize rationally and objectively their necessity and usefulness for the country, state, society and citizens. Sweeping defamation and intentional discreditation with the help of "arguments", which are obviously false, only contribute to the extrusion of security services outside of rule of law and instigates them to chaos".[9]

Paul Goble, director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, claims "the Kremlin has dispatched its own “agents of influence” to political forums on the Internet both to portray itself as having more support than it has and to suggest that its opponents who would like to see a more democratic Russia with closer ties to the West are an ever more marginal group"[11]

Public perception in Russia

In 2007 sociological analysis of big groups in Russian society published at Russian resource RIO-Center, it's mentioned that idea of existence of web-brigades is a widespread conspiracy theory in RuNet. Authors say "it's difficult to say whether hypothesis of existence of web-brigades corresponds to reality", "web brigades are conspiracy theory" but acknowledge that the users profess views on the existence of "web-brigades". [12]

"We are losing in the Internet in that respect. It is always easier to break down things than to do something positive. What you are doing are jokes and minor infractions. Not only methods, but also goals must be radical. We must blow this romantics out of them [our opponents]. It is important not only to protect the authorities - this is understood, but we need to attract young people who can work creatively in the Internet. This is an important communication place of young people. Make them interested in conversations with you."[14]

Internet brigades in Russian literature

The alleged FSB activities on the Internet have been described in the short story "Anastasya" by Russian writer Grigory Svirsky, who was interested in the moral aspects of their work.[15] He wrote: "It seems that offending, betraying, or even "murdering" people in the virtual space is easy. This is like killing an enemy in a video game: one does not see a disfigured body or the eyes of the person who is dying right in front of you. However, the human soul lives by its own basic laws that force it to pay the price for the virtual crime in his real life".[3]

Outside Russia

Russian brigades in the Polish Internet

Russian "Internet brigades" reportedly appeared in Poland in 2005. According to claims of anonymous "Polish experts on Russian affairs", reported by the Polish newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, "at least a dozen active Russian agents work in Poland, also investigating the Polish Internet. They are claimed to scrutinize Polish websites (like those supporting Belarusian opposition), and also to perform such actions, as—for instance—contributing to Internet forums on large portals (like Gazeta.pl, Onet.pl, WP.pl). Labeled as Polish Internet users, they incite anti-Semitic or anti-Ukrainian discussions or disavow articles published on the web."[16]

Internet propaganda teams in mainland China

It has been reported[1] that in 2005, departments of provincial and municipal governments in mainland China began creating teams of Internet commentators from propaganda and police departments and offering them classes in Marxism, propaganda techniques, and the Internet. They are reported to guide discussion on public bulletin boards away from politically sensitive topics by posting opinions anonymously or under false names. "They are actually hiring staff to curse online", said Liu Di, a Chinese student who was arrested for posting her comments in blogs.

Netherlands

It was reported that Dutch police have set up an Internet Brigade to fight cybercrime. Among its planned actions are to infiltrate internet newsgroups and discussion forums for intelligence gathering, to make pseudo-purchase and to provide services.[17].

Internet brigades in Wikipedia?

A number of publications suggested that intelligence agents may have infiltrated Wikipedia to remove undesirable information [18] The design and application of WikiScanner technology proved such suspicions to be well founded, although it remains unknown how many agents from around the world operate in Wikipedia [19][20][21][22][23]

11/16/2013

Glenn Greenwald appears on the big screen via Skype. He says he can't come back to the US for fear of "persecution". A letter sent by a congressman to Eric Holder inquiring whether he would be arrested if he returned didn't get the answer he wanted. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Last night I went to the program "They're Watching Us: So What" at Fordham University Law School's Center for National Security -- which is an activist bunch working for the insecurity of an American government they loathe, and empowerment of bands of anarchists who advocate absolute encryption of themselves without accountability or accessibility of law enforcement.

If they think they are not those things, and not working for those things, they aren't paying attention.

There weren't any practicing lawyers on the speaker's platform however, and there was no legal analysis -- nor any real case actually made -- during the entire evening.

It was appalling.

It was also boring.

I've been following this topic so closely that when I hear these speakers already very familiar to me in all their permutations go through very simplistic arguments that they think they need to descend to for large audiences like these, it really gets dull and frustrating.

I'll be honest -- I even fell asleep almost during James Bamford's talk.

Not only were they simplistic, they were old. At least the kids like Trevor Trimm and Chris Soghoian have a little more life to them when they speak. Bamford is 67; Schneier is 50; Ariel Dorfperson, as we used to call him affectionately in the 1980s, is 71. These are old guys, reliving their battles of the 1960s and 1980s. I suspect the panel was convened in haste. It was co-sponsored by PEN Club, and I suspect PEN was put under pressure from members to take this on.

A very, very thin and superficial survey was put out by PEN opportunistically to fit with the headlines, commissioned by some firm that probably got a big fee, that canvassed the subjective feelings of PEN members. They "felt" they were under surveillance and they "thought" this chilled them, but not any evidence of anything but hysteria and "hate the Man" sort of 1960s antagonism was evident anywhere. It was embarassing.

The title of the panel was "They're Watching Us: So What?" But the "so what" part was left to the bored students in the audience, not the panelists who never engaged with this critique with anything remotely like intellectual honesty. I find it especially appalling when universities have evenings like this that are so horridly politicized and biased -- ending, of all things, with a black activist woman getting up and demanding that Obama be impeached because of Snowden's revelations about the NSA -- which about half the audience wildly applauded. I think even the lefty radical organizers were made a bit uncomfortable by this rabble-rousing.

Most of the people in the audience in fact were old like the speakers. They were hipsters, hippies, old professors, old Upper West Side socialists who have been around for ages. To be sure, there were actual young students, but they were only there with "continuous partial attention" as it is called. One man next to me was studying his history class notes, of all things, about the Soviet Army. The girl to the other side seemed to be taking notes on the talk but not really, checking her email or Facebook or whatever. Others were glued to their phones or i-Pads doing other things.

Suzanne Nossel, who is now director of PEN Club, chaired the meeting. And I was quite disappointed in her own lack of intellectual rigour on this subject. She is a former Obama Administration official who worked on international organizations and human rights, and was particularly active on the 16/18 resolution, for example, which was an effort by the Obama Administration to capitalize on the liberalization of the Arab Spring and work with former antagonist Egypt. They came up with a resolution about hatred and racism that would NOT constitiute a global blasphemy law or accept the discredited notion of "defamation of religion," which is what the Organization for Islamic Community wanted out of it. (BTW, it's funny to see Lee Stranahan tackling this with such vigour now as the root cause of Benghazi -- I appreciate his effort to get to the bottom of the story, but he's gotten it wrong, because it was delivered to him in a tendentious context -- it's actually failure to apply the language and formulations of 16/18 by the US Embassy in Cairo over the hate video that created the problems -- the resolution in fact is based on US Supreme Court language about "incitement of imminent violence" precisely so that general criticism of theocratic states is not something that is then declared as "defamation of religion".)

For personal reasons, Nossel, famous for writing a book about American "smart power" and even credited with coining the term, which is an outgrowth of the term "soft power", left Obamaland after the first Obama term. She then went to serve as Amnesty International's executive director at a time when the organization was suffering hugely from a devastating loss of contributions and frankly the fallout from Amnesty headquarters completely losing its way in the post 9/11 wilderness and taking up defense of jihad.

Nossel was supposed to get it back on track with donors and the public, and might have done so, had she not fallen victim to a very vicious and concerted claque of people who tried to smear her as somehow sanctioning drones and other dubious acts of the Obama Administration, even though she had nothing to do with those programs and was strictly in the human rights efforts of diplomacy. That may be no excuse for some, but it is an important distinction and she herself is a "progressive" that the hard left seems to take particularly delight in pushing and destroying. It didn't help that she is Jewish, and was accused unfairly of over-protectiveness of Israel which also wasn't the case (and saying so is a form of antisemitism, quite frankly) -- she was simply for not singling Israel out unfairly at the UN, where alone among nations it has its own agenda item at the Human Rights Council where countries like Russia or China or Iran or Sudan or Pakistan, which have killed many times more insurgents as well as innocents, are left to hold sway with impunity.

While NGOs surely appreciated her role at State in an Administration where the President does not have a single human rights bone in his body, Nossel was not popular at AI for having to cut staff and make other austerity measures needed at Amnesty, which is still far from fixed -- and she was hounded out of the organization, something I find absolutely disgraceful of Amnesty and its board. Former government officials may not make the best NGO leaders (and it works the other way, too, you know), but the board knew that going in, and shouldn't have hired her in the first place if the had problems with "I have a drone" Obama and her associations.

I don't know if weathering that sectarianism and viciousness at Amnesty -- entire hate pages were posted about poor Nossel by rabid idiots -- made her quick to jump and respond with the politically-correct program around Snowden just as soon as a few lefty and radical PEN members began to bark. I suspect that may have been how it happened, but I don't know. I think it's probably more likely that in her "progressiveness," she thinks Snowden is right. Working at the US Embassy in Geneva during the Human Rights Council sessions, maybe she even knew Snowden or heard of him, as he used to work there.

In any event, she's totally drunk the Greenwald Kool-aid, and it's a sad sight. Other members of PEN should complain about this one-sided approach by their fellow members, so that the director does not feel whipsawed by a few loudmouths. There are no findings. There are no cases, as I'm always saying; machine reading of meta data is not an intrusion in privacy and not the compilation of a dossier.

Glenn Greenwald was beamed in on a screen via Skype to wild applause and cheers -- Skype, which was said to be full of security holes and backdoors long before Microsoft, but he just had to knock Microsoft, taking a star turn to dis The Man in Big It. There he hung in the air, like the old 1984 Apple ad about Big Brother, and he himself realized that's exactly how he looked, and called himself Little Big Brother-- at least Cory Doctorow, another insufferable ass, has a little more humility and calls himself Little Brother.

Greenwald made the worst, most lame argument that the crypto kids always make -- I've heard it a hundred times on Twitter. He took up the argument that frankly probably reflected the thoughts of some of the students in the hall who didn't clap wildly for him or anybody ("battle of who could care less"). If they weren't doing anything wrong, if they were just a little guy, why should they care if the government saw their email out of a gadzillion numbers of files?

"Hey," he said in his usual snotty tone. "If you feel that way, give me all your passwords to all your accounts and I'll be sure to mine them for something that will compromise you and publish it."

Except...the governent doesn't do that.

If the government scans my email by some fluke -- perhaps I'm six hops away from a terrorist or a spy -- it doesn't delve into the content unless it has a warrant or it feels that the case is serious enough to fit under FISA rules of warrantless surveillance.

And even if it does scan my mail, it does not publish it.

It doesn't try to smear and embarass me as Glenn promises to do with anybody who thinks government surveillance isn't a big deal, and is willing to give him their password.

I really wish more people would stand up to him when he makes that utterly dishonest argument.

In fact, there isn't a single case brought to light by Greenwald from Snowden's material publicizing anybody's private communications. There isn't a case where the government publicized something they purloined from email to embarass or silence someone. No one can show that, at all. This is not COINTELPRO as I've said a hundred times. (Read my timeline for an interminable debate on this very subject with a rather dense individual named Andy Downs who has a major grievance with the FBI -- an agent shot dead his father, a pilot, when he was trying to rescue hostages who had forced his father to fly a small plane. From this case of 40 years ago, which isn't anything like a COINTELPRO case but is just his own case of excessive force/ failure to follow procedures -- a case he doesn't seem to have -- Downs tries to claim that there are concrete cases now of the NSA watching people and harming them. It's truly sad, but it's typical of the emotional blackmail we constantly face on this topic by people with agendas trying to tie them to the NSA.)

It's really terrible watching the feeble minds -- and the conniving manipulators like Greenwald -- going through these really flawed and lame arguments that smart professors at a place like Fordham should be decimating. Very worrisome. The "give me your password and I'll publish all your stuff if you don't think it matters" is especially manipulative yet stupid because the government doesn't publish what it sees -- or "sees" only in a mechanical sense.

Manipulators like Greenwald try to capture the predictably emotional reaction people would have at the thought of "the world" seeing their private communications, and tries to exploit that to bring them around to taking an antagonistic position about meta-data dredging. But meta-data dredging doesn't involve naming and shaming you in public; it doesn't even involve human eyes looking at your mail; chances are your mail isn't even involved if you aren't in fact related in some way to foreign spies or terrorists, even distantly.

Greenwald is intellectually dishonest and in fact committing malpractice as a journalist if not a lawyer when he makes this hugely contrived argument. More people have to say what I've been saying to him: OK, Glenn, bring it. I'll give you my passwords, but here's the thing. You have to do exactly what the government does, then. As you've reported that it does! You have to NOT PUBLISH IT. After all, we don't know the CONTENT of Merkel's phone, do we? And you may store it and mine it -- but only with key words or numbers drawn from terrorists and other criminal suspects.

What the government does NOT do -- you haven't proven that it has -- is mine our stuff, pick out things to harass and humiliate us,and then publish them.

That's what Jeremy Hammond does, and that's why he has 10 years in prison.

I really worry that we are dealing with mass hysteria here, where even very smart people who have done decent work like Suzanne Nossel are captured by this contrived bullshit. It's terribly wrong.

The Crypto Gramps at Fordham. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Ariel Dorfman, an old lefty from the past who survived Pinochet, gave a moving and stark depiction of life in Chile when people had REAL concerns about government surveillance insead of the yuppie ones that Americans have now. He showed scenes of prisons with wires used to spy on people and described all the chilling effect it had on the soul and the literal relationships of life. To his credit, although he is an old socialist antagonist of capitalist US government for ages, Dorfman didn't make fatuous comparisons between a real society of oppression like Pinochet's Chile, at least for communists and socialists, and the United States today. He's too decent for that.

Less so everybody around him on the panel, and in the audience. That's the problem. His job was to provide the "Global South" contingent to this lily-white panel of North Americans, and he did the job admirably.

You can watch the video linked above, but meanwhile, let me note how awful Schneier is. I'm a long-time critic, and he, like so many of these cryptos, was indeed worse in real life than on the Internet.

11/07/2013

I'd much rather write about substance than have to keep defending myself from this creep, but I don't follow the "don't feed the trolls" advice -- and I think women bloggers on the Internet should fight back.

Joshua Foust has a story up on the paid-content site Beacon, The Most Bizarre Jihadist Trial You've Never Heard Of, where he is one of the selected authors for this new service, so not so many will see it. You have to pay $5/ month. If you do want to pay, then pay your $5 to some other author on the service (I paid Matthew Lee who is basically one of the very few critical reporters on the UN) -- that will enable you still to see any of the authors.

I've long covered the story of Jamshid Muhtorov, the Uzbek emigre who was arrested on charges of material support to terrorists. And I've long disputed Foust's characterization of the arrest in this case as unjust. I believe he was properly arrested on the evidence available.

And I predicted that Foust would change his story, now that he is trying to get a job again in intelligence or defense or Thinktankistan. And sure enough, he now concedes where he didn't before that this case is indeed about material assistance to a terrorist group -- before, he took a much more radical position and said Muhtorov was wrongfully arrested for "Interneting while Muslim" i.e. merely guilty of chat on the Internet with extremist groups, not of action, and that it was a "thought crime." He also discounted the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan as a real threat, although they have commited a range of terrorist attacks and have killed our soldiers in Afghanistan. He's now dropped his questioning of the IMU, but has kept his basic "progressive" position of denying there is a case here.

Anyone who has been following Registan.net knows EXACTLY the sleight of hand that went on here, and it is easily discoverable from reading all his back posts there.

In the past, Foust has accused me of putting Muhtorov in jail (!) and being a "liar and a fabulist" -- I refuted it here. This is so far out that I think it self-discredits, but too many people read and retweet Foust when they should know better, so let me point out the following refutations of his smear.

First, I should note that his entire article is lifted from my research. I'm the one that dug up the WikiLeaks cable and wrote about Muhtorov's past connections to various groups. The Registan bloggers had none of this, as you can easily see from their posts in the past on Registan.net. I was the one who put this all together. Foust steals liberally from this research and these links without any credit simply because he can.

Now, the paragraphs about me behind the pay wall:

Worse still, it seems the prosecution had relied on random blogposts to try to cast doubt on whether Mukhtarov was really a human rights activist. In describing Mukhtarov as too violent to release, it appears the prosecution tried to say he had faked his experience as a human rights worker in Uzbekistan:

A prosecutor also asserts that Muhtorov may have misrepresented himself a human-rights activist and that he may have received refugee status on fake grounds…

Holloway writes that some online articles say Muhtorov was an “opportunist who was dismissed from the Ezgulik Human Rights Society because he supported violent extremism.”

Another, Holloway wrote, “claims the defendant acted as an informant for Uzbek intelligence and received refugee status on fake grounds.”

Those articles come from Catherine Fitzpatrick, who is active in online circles and has a history of personally attacking those she disagrees with. She has spent, without exaggeration, years trying to personally defame a number of scholars, journalists, and activists who do not share her political beliefs, including this writer, and took to her blog to then try to defame Mukhtarov because people she disliked had expressed skepticism of his case (that full story is here).

That is who the prosecution relied on to try to deny Mukhtarov’s well-documented history with personally risky human rights activism in Uzbekistan. It was astonishing to long-term watchers of the country.

It is hard not to see Jamshid Mukhtarov as the victim of bad luck. Last May he held a brief hunger strike to protest his austere conditions. He also may have broken U.S. material support laws about banned terrorist groups.

Look, prosecutors do not jail people on the basis of random blog posts. Muhtorov was arrested and put in custody long before I ever blogged anything. There is not only FISA intelligence on this -- which is why it will become a national test -- but individual eye-witnesses from the Uzbek emigre population such as this one who also spoke to the emigre press that have given testimony about how Muhtorov became extremely religious and those around him grew concerned.

Foust published a picture of Foust without credit that has been repeatedly published by uznews.net and other emigre outlets; he notes his beard but could have also noted his forehead bruises from prostrations in prayer, which is what emigres have noted.

Foust does not read Russian. I do. My blog post about Muhtorov isn't my opinion, but my translations of a series of other people's articles about him. That has always been something Foust has chosen to ignore. In translating excerpts of these sources, I've been careful to show how they are biased --- the Kyrgyz refugee official who says Muhtorov may have been cooperating with the police as an informant and thought he was an opportunist; the Uzbek emigre who is known for his frequent attacks on others who thought he was cooperating with the Uzbek secret police; and the human rights group that he left after they confronted him over financial issues-- a fact Foust ignores each time he tells this story as it doesn't fit the narrative. There's also the claims from the emigre who says that Muhtorov was involved in disputes with the authorities of his family's vodka distribution business (this was before he became religious) and his sister's jailing, and that was his basis for a vendetta against the government, not participation in the human rights movement.

The prosecutor's particular statement isn't based on me merely spouting, it's based on reading a blog about translations of other sources who declared Muhtorov to be an opportunist, i.e. using the human rights movement to emigrate. Foust fails to note that he wasn't involved in the Andijan events and wasn't even there during the massacre.

Indeed there is concern that he received refugee status on false grounds, but he had a convoluted history that began with anger of his sister's arrest in a murder case and culminated in his flight to Kyrgyzstan on a secret policeman's tip to get out of town (?!) and ultimately his entry to the US at a time when the US was allowing in Uzbek refugees. He does indeed face a well-founded fear of perscution and likely torture if returned (unless in fact he was a police agent all along, and even that may not help), so he shouldn't be returned to Uzbekistan. But he was properly arrested and his detention extended, and certainly not on some blog's say-so.

Foust then proceeds to claim falsely that I have a "history of personally attacking those she disagrees with." Then he links to those few online stalkers who have endlessly attacked me and who I debunk in my tongue-in-cheek "Advice to Google Witch-hunters" at the top of this blog. That includes Benjamin Duranske, a coder-turned-lawyer with radical ideas (like brain-uploading to the Internet, support of the Caliphate, and support of business in China against dissidents -- to mention only some of the issues I confronted him about). He's someone who deserved a good pushback and I'm proud of doing so. In fact, I should have realized sooner that people like this weren't just in and around the coders of Second Life, but in general becoming a whole threat to the society at large.

As for the notion that I have "spent, without exaggeration, years trying to personally defame a number of scholars, journalists, and activists who do not share her political beliefs, including this writer," what he means is just...him and his two friends at Registan, Nathan Hamm and Sarah Kendzior. (All three of them once held academic or think-tank or consulting positions; all three of them are now free-lance journalists so I can't help thinking I'm far from the only person with a problem with them -- there are scores of academics, journalists, and nonprofit activists critical of all of them, but only quietly because they fear controversy or being smeared.)

It all began when I questioned Foust's repeated minimization of human rights problems and tacit support of the regimes of places like Uzbekistan when he launched an outrageous series of attacks on human rights leaders over their criticism of Gulnara Karimova. Astoundingly, Foust savagely attacked anyone who exposed her antics, claiming they were lying at worst or at best, ineffective. Everyone in the human rights movement from Human Rights Watch to Committee to Protect Journalists knows this, but they don't speak out at the advice of lawyers and bosses. They all know exactly what Foust is about and how he has twisted and turned on his positions.

I pointed out that his minimization of the massacre in Kazakhstan as a mere labour dispute that would be smoothed over was no different than the establishment views he ridiculed of another scholar; when he saw that someone dared to say this on his blog, he went wild, and sent his troops after me. I refuted each point at length here after I was banned. These "scholars" (Kendzior has since left academia to work for Al Jazeera) then harassed and bullied me, claiming that I "lied" about the mistreatment of political prisones in Uzbekistan for which I had ample testimony from relatives and lawyers. (A good summary of all of this is here).

A notorious series of take-downs of Foust by the scurrilous Mark Ames were actually prompted by the same incident -- Foust's down-playing of the massacre in Kazakhstan. I don't carry any water for Ames, who is a kind of neo-Bolshevik and admirer of Edward Limonov, head of the National Bolshevik Party of Russia -- it's too bad that my more considered rebuttal of Foust's outrageous apologia for the regimes of Central Asia gets far less notice than Ames' flamboyant mining of Foust's sad past as a victim of bullying turned bully himself.

While I don't call him names, in all his rants about me, Foust has called me a "liar," a "lunatic," a "fabulist" etc. and dredged up stalkers from the online community of Second Life who harassed me years ago to make his case. He has to link to a Google cache in the case of Benjamin Duranske, because Duranske, who now works at Paypal after a series of other jobs didn't work out, removed his hate page against me when he took a job at a law firm some years ago because he realized that sort of page does more harm to his reputation and his firm than me.

It's worth watching this debate in the original -- lots of people are happy I took on Robert Wright. In sum, he hated it when I raised the issue of the ethics involved (even if legality is not at issue) in taking files from a source like Manning and not caring about the ramifications of the anarchist assault he is making on a liberal government.

A frustrating thing with this story is that key people I've interviewed won't talk and won't be cited even off the record. But I know that eventually the story will be established. If there were not sufficient grounds to sentence Muhtorov and he released, then justice will prevail -- I don't need Muhtorov to remain in jail to stand by my views that he was properly arrested and our government's intelligence agencies should continue doing their job to watch out for terrorists. It may be that sufficient pressure will be put on the prosecutors, and sufficient evidence brought forward that Muhtorov will be released. So be it -- that doesn't change a thing about the essential issue here: the difference between human rights work and opportunism; the difference between human rights work and abetting terrorism.

Muhtorov chose to leave Uzbekistan while others chose to stay and keep fighting for human rights. He wasn't jailed as so many were because he didn't really engage in activism. He was able to create a story for himself and get out and get to the US -- and he's not the first nor the last to do so.

US law takes seriously the issue of material support to terrorism. It's not trivial. A mere $300 in support is enough to get arrested. A translation of a web page for Al Qaeda earns a jail sentence as we know. I support these lawful actions by the US government and do not see them as a chill on speech - there is plenty of untrammeled pro-jihad speech everywhere, just look at Youtube. We have only to think of the Tsarnaev brothers and those who lost their limbs inthe Boston bombing to understand that intelligence-gathering for the purpose of trying to prevent terrorism is necessary in a democratic society.

11/03/2013

You know, I had wondered why Jonathan Chait, who usually seems to be adversarial, was suddenly making all these propagandistic tweets about ObamaCare.

And this explains a lot -- Obama views columnists like Chait as "portals".

Once the adversarial journalists come out of the White House "off the record" meetings, they feel loved and accepted and can't help then tweeting Soviet-style happy stories.

The People's Health Care plan is going along swimmingly and if somebody is told to get off their insurance and that they must buy the more expensive ObamaCare, well, they just have shitty insurance and never really studied the terms of their shitty insurance so it's all their own fault.